If I click on an ad for funeral services I might buy something but probably won't. But I may have just confirmed that a close relative just died. That factoid is worth something to a great many people beyond the local funeral parlor who paid for the ad. I should expect real estate agents and quack financial advisers to be knocking on my door by the end of the day.
Found via https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/8a3oku/bra...
I see 3 models for websites: completely donation based, advertising based, or subscription based. Many sites would have trouble getting the donations they would need to operate. Subscription based means only rich people can afford to use it. Advertising means poor people get the same functionality as rich people.
As with most things on the internet, the porn industry did it first.
That subscription might be reasonable for a middle class person in the US, but way too expensive for the average person in a poorer country. Ads put everyone on the same footing.
And if you want to do research on a topic across many different websites, it'll happen that they won't all be in the same community, so you'll have to pay subscription fees to many different communities, sometimes just for a single page view.
Of course it was canceled at some point, and now it looks like there is some meager effort to require sites to opt-in somehow.... I can't tell if any sites have actually done so.
Too bad, because I really liked the old experience.
I'm still not sure why we're now basing our entire economy around advertising crap to people that they don't want or need, the web was ad free and worked great for many years before all this nonsense.
The fact that most all of the smart people in tech have been subsumed into ad tech is one of the most depressing things I could have possibly imagined 21 years ago. What a massive misuse of resources.